Thursday, November 27, 2014

Global Warning: "If the ocean was whiskey . . ."

Just look at what global warming is doing to the oceans! Thank goodness I'm on the ball and ready to shout out a global warning! Red hot arctic seas - heat goes up, you know! Underwater mountain ranges exposed in all their now-naked uprightness! Other stuff I don't know what are!

Just kidding. The images are the dried residues left at the bottom of whisky glasses:

Eight years ago, Mr. Button was about to wash the glass when he noticed that leftover drops of Scotch had dried into a chalky but unexpectedly beautiful film. "When I lifted it up to the light, I noticed these really delicate, fine lines on the bottom," he recalled, "and being a photographer for a number of years before this, I'm like, 'Hmm, there's something to this.'"

He eventually found the right man of science to study the strange effect:

Mr. Button typed "fluid mechanics" and "art" into Google. Up popped a list of search results that included Dr. Stone.

Mr. Button emailed. Dr. Stone responded.

"I remember it wasn't clear what we were looking at," Dr. Stone said.

And they're still not entirely sure what they're looking at, as you'll learn if you go to the story itself. And if you go to Ernie Button's site, you'll see many more images.

About Me

I am a professor at Ewha Womans University, where I teach composition, research writing, and cultural issues, including the occasional graduate seminar on Gnosticism and Johannine theology and the occasional undergraduate course on European history.
My doctorate is in history (U.C. Berkeley), with emphasis on religion and science. My thesis is on John's gospel and Gnosticism.
I also work as one-half of a translating team with my wife, and our most significant translation is Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil, which was funded by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.
I'm also an award-winning writer, and I recommend my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, to anyone interested.
I'm originally from the Arkansas Ozarks, but my academic career -- funded through doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., Fulbright, Naumann, Lady Davis) -- has taken me through Texas, California, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Israel and has landed me in Seoul, South Korea. I've also traveled to Mexico, visited much of Europe, including Moscow, and touched down briefly in a few East Asian countries.
Hence: "Gypsy Scholar."